All Blog Posts Tagged 'as' - Atheist Nexus2018-05-24T20:14:59Zhttp://atheistnexus.org/profiles/blog/feed?tag=as&xn_auth=noI call out a Preacher on his lies!tag:atheistnexus.org,2018-05-22:2182797:BlogPost:27978502018-05-22T12:30:00.000ZCompelledunbelieverhttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/Compelledunbeliever
<p> Howdy! I had an exchange with Preacher Matt Powell and asked him to back up his claims about conversations he claims to have had with atheist. He promply tried to cover up his lies. This is my new video about the exchange. Was I too harsh on him? How would you have handled it?…<a href="Https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&amp;v=r3jif0vj8Cg"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/r3jif0vj8Cg?wmode=opaque" width="560"><a href="Https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&amp;v=r3jif0vj8Cg"></a></iframe>
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<p> Howdy! I had an exchange with Preacher Matt Powell and asked him to back up his claims about conversations he claims to have had with atheist. He promply tried to cover up his lies. This is my new video about the exchange. Was I too harsh on him? How would you have handled it?<a href="Https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&amp;v=r3jif0vj8Cg"><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/r3jif0vj8Cg?wmode=opaque" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""><a href="Https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&amp;v=r3jif0vj8Cg"></a><a href="Https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&amp;v=r3jif0vj8Cg"></a><a href="Https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&amp;v=r3jif0vj8Cg"></a><a href="Https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&amp;v=r3jif0vj8Cg"></a><a href="Https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&amp;v=r3jif0vj8Cg"></a><a href="Https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&amp;v=r3jif0vj8Cg"></a><a href="Https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&amp;v=r3jif0vj8Cg"></a><p></p>
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</a></p>Did Human Morality Come from God or from Evolution?tag:atheistnexus.org,2018-05-12:2182797:BlogPost:27975572018-05-12T21:30:00.000ZHomer Edward Pricehttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/HomerEdwardPrice730
<p>Public prejudice toward atheists is still high, not only in the United States but in most of the countries in the world. Around half of Americans would refuse to vote for an atheist for public office, according to recent polls. Polls also show that the rejection of atheists is mainly due to the public assumption that people who are irreligious are also immoral, since they have no fear of punishment by God. But is God really the source of human morality? Certainly the Judaeo-Christian-Muslim…</p>
<p>Public prejudice toward atheists is still high, not only in the United States but in most of the countries in the world. Around half of Americans would refuse to vote for an atheist for public office, according to recent polls. Polls also show that the rejection of atheists is mainly due to the public assumption that people who are irreligious are also immoral, since they have no fear of punishment by God. But is God really the source of human morality? Certainly the Judaeo-Christian-Muslim God, invented less than two thousand years ago, is not the source of morality, because humans have probably had a fully developed morality for at least the last 300,000 years. That was well before they first showed signs of being religious, and as I argued in my previous blog post, “The Theology and Science of Free Will,” a religion may reinforce the particular morality of the group that practices it, but morality itself is not religious in origin. Morality actually emerged in the tension between individual humans and the groups that they belonged to, leading to the need of the groups to control the behavior of their members.</p>
<p>In order to understand how this tension developed, we need first to look to the research that has been done on the behavior of our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, both in the wild and in captivity. Chimps and humans had a common ancestor some six or seven million years ago and share over 98% of their DNA, and that is evident in the similarities in their behavior. Chimps, like humans, can be individualistic and selfish and aggressive are potentially violent when they come into conflict with each other. In chimpanzees, a male might want to monopolize access to a female when her swollen, pink bottom shows that she is in estrus or heat and therefore sexually receptive. Consequently, a sort of “pecking order” or dominance hierarchy develops among the chimps, with the alpha male able to fight off or bluff any other male. However, often a female will prefer another male and so sneak off with him into the woods where the alpha male cannot see them. All of the males get to have sex, but because of the females’ as well as the males’ promiscuity, no one knows who fathered particular infants. However, chimp social life is not just about conflict and sex. The chimps share the human pro-social tendencies of sympathy, empathy, reciprocity, and reconciliation. They just don’t have a system of morality.</p>
<p>The human line, classified with us in the genus Homo, split off from the scattering of species intermediate between us and chimpanzees in east Africa nearly two million years ago. Homo Erectus, as the name implies, stood erect, with long, striding legs and shoulders adapted for throwing things. They got much of their protein as scavengers: When they learned that carnivores had killed a large animal, perhaps because they spotted the vultures circling above it, they raced across the savannah and converged as a group on the scene, screaming and yelling and throwing rocks until the pack of carnivores fled. Then these proto-humans used their carefully crafted “hand-axes” (stone discs with a cutting edge all around) to carve up the meat so they could carry it to their camp. They were safe there on the ground, even at night, because they could build a fire to keep predators at bay in the dark. They had not, apparently, discovered the advantages of cooking the meat in the fire, or at least they had not figured out how to do it properly.</p>
<p>Robin Dunbar, in his book Human Evolution: Our Brains and Our Behavior, has estimated the “mentalizing” abilities of our various pre-human ancestors on the basis of the sizes of their brain-cases. He defines intelligence in terms of “levels of intentionality” or how many individuals’ intentions can be kept in mind at the same time. All mammals have at least first-order intentionality: They form their own intentions and carry them into action. (I called that free will in my first blog.). Elephants, dolphins and apes, including chimps, have second-order intentionality: They not only form intentions that direct their own actions, they also recognize that other members of their group do so. Dunbar estimates that modern humans have fifth-order intentionality: We can form our own intentions and follow the intentions, attitudes, and points of view of four other people, all at the same time. Erectus and other species in the human line had at least third-order intentionality: They they knew that they had intentions, attitudes, and emotions and that others of their kind did, as well, and they could also turn around and look at themselves from the point of view of the other members of their own groups.</p>
<p>Dunbar focuses on the need of groups such as the Erectus scavenger-bands to maintain social bonds or a feeling unity among the members so they would be able to stay together and cooperate. He suggests that they might have used laughter (perhaps in response to physical comedy by the “class clowns” among them) to create warm feelings in the group. He does not recognize that such feelings were not enough to overcome the conflicts that boiled up among the selfish, aggressive individualists that made up the band. Some kind of social control or morality would have to have been imposed on them by the group. But laughter could have helped to do that job as well. Erectus were capable of third-order intentionality but were not capable of articulate speech. Instead, they would have had a variety of verbal calls and/or gestures that could have been used to express their emotions. I therefore propose the hypothesis that Erectus groups could have used shame as means of social control. Their gestures and calls could have shown social disapproval, but laughter is the most powerful shaming mechanism. It erupts spontaneously when someone does something socially inappropriate. The shamed individual would have seen herself from the point of view of the group and felt negatively about herself to the same degree that her group did. The blushing response to shaming must have evolved prior to language, at the Erectus stage, since it is not necessary when people can apologize for what they do. The individuals who blushed would be seen to be accepting the group’s point of view and would have therefore been forgiven for their unacceptable behavior. Those who did not blush and did not correct their behavior to avoid shaming might have been thrown out of the group and would probably not have survived alone on the savannah, much less have been able to reproduce the genes that did not code for blushing.</p>
<p>Homo Heidelbergensis evolved out of Homo Erectus in Africa about 600,000 years ago. They were capable of articulate speech as well as of third-order intentionality and therefore the members of its bands were capable of coming to agreements among themselves that stated social rules and standards of behavior for themselves. The three levels of intentionality were in play at each stage of negotiations: Each individual formed the idea of coming to an agreement that represented the point of view of the group, each intended to do so, and each knew that the others intended to do so as well. Next, each acknowledged that agreement as stating the expectations of the group when it was reached, pledged to abide by it, and knew that the others did the same. And finally, each could compare the standards set in that agreement to his own behavior and to that of the others. But a rational contract of this sort is not self-enforcing. A coldly rational individual would not take the risk and make the effort to enforce the contract on another individual on behalf of the group. I therefore propose the hypothesis that to strengthen enforcement of group moral standards, the Heidelbergs evolved the uniquely human emotion of moral outrage at violators of the group’s moral rules or norms; I also propose the hypothesis that moral outrage directed against the self for violating those norms is the source of the feeling of guilt. Heidelberg groups whose members had these emotions of outrage and guilt would have been much more effective at enforcing their own morality on each other and the members also would be more likely to enforce the rules on themselves. Therefore those groups would be more cohesive and cooperative and successful in ensuring their own survival and reproduction. Individuals who had not evolved these emotions and therefore did not enforce the group’s moral standards on themselves and on the others would be likely to be thrown out of the group and die.</p>
<p>The major kind of social agreement that the Heidelbergs developed was marriage, a huge innovation in human morality. Richard Wrangham in his book, Catching Fire, shows that it was the discovery and spread of cooking led to the establishment of the institution of marriage. Cooking greatly increases the digestibility and nutritional value of food, especially of meat and root vegetables such as potatoes. It therefore made possible a rapid evolutionary increase in the size of the brain. The brain is the most voracious organ in the body, using much more than its share of the energy obtained from metabolizing food. Enough energy for larger brains was available only when eating cooked food. Cooking food also enabled a mother to provide sufficient easily consumed nutrition for then needs of children with rapidly developing brains and thereby increased their chances of survival. But she could not do it alone. Unlike the families of all but one species of ape, human families typically do not just include a mother and her children; they also include an adult male, ideally the father of the children. That is because, until the invention modern appliances, at least one member of the family had to spend hours during the day maintaining the cooking fire and making sure that the food was cooked properly. And at the same time that cooking developed, humans were becoming more proficient hunters. Hunting itself is time consuming, and one person cannot spend enough time hunting and enough time maintaining the fire during the day and gathering and cooking vegetables to survive. A partner was needed to compensate for this time constraint. Human mothers would gather wild vegetable foods of various sorts and cook that food at each family’s cooking fire in the group’s campground while the men in their group were off hunting much of the day. But when one of those men returned, he could raid the campsite of any woman to steal the food she had been cooking.</p>
<p>Wrangham argues that the cultural solution to this problem was marriage, in which the husband agreed to became the protector of his wife, who in turn agreed to cook for him and their children. The husband protected his wife not by standing guard at the fire, but by coming to a moral agreement with the other men in the group that they would respect each man’s right to the food prepared by his own wife as well as his exclusive sexual access to her. Second, the men also agreed that they would share the meat from any large animal killed by any member of the group, so that each man’s wife would have meat to cook along with the vegetables that she had gathered. Third, they agreed that in decision making affecting the group, no one would be allowed to act as boss. Each married man would have an equal say in the discussions leading to any decision. This morality of equality, sharing, and marriage is universal among human hunting-gathering cultures because no other social pattern is compatible with that way of life. It was not inevitable that such a complex cultural arrangement would be worked out, and many human hunting and gathering groups probably died out because they failed to achieve it. The first to achieve it were the Heidelbergs. Numerous cooking fires only appear in the archaeological record in their time, 400,000 years ago, followed after another 100,000 years by a dramatic evolutionary increase in their skull and brain size, made possible by their improved nutrition. They later evolved into modern humans in Africa and into Neanderthals in Europe.</p>
<p>Marriage, as adaptive as it was in the context of the hunting-gathering lifestyle, was not easy for these human ancestors to maintain, with their chimp-like desires and emotions. But they evolved further biologically to enable them to conform to the moral standards they had set for themselves. Most obviously, women evolved to stop showing the pink swellings of their genitals that female chimpanzees showed during estrus. The same evolutionary change made women sexually receptive whether they were in their short period of fertility or not, so wives would be willing and able to entertain their husbands almost any time of the month, making it unnecessary for their husbands to stray into the arms of other women. A less obvious change was the evolution of a new function for an old hormone, oxytocin. In all mammals, its release into the bloodstream and the brain is stimulated in a pregnant female by the vaginal birth of her offspring, and the hormone primes her to become emotionally attached to the infant and to want to care for it. Physical contact between the mother and infant in the course of that care stimulates further releases of the hormone in her and in the baby. Not only that; it is also released during vaginal sexual intercourse, in human males as well as females. And it reaches sustained high levels in romantically involved couples. It makes them feel happy and relaxed as a result of having physical contact with each other or even of just thinking about their partner. So long as that effect lasts, the couple are likely to have eyes only for each other and stay loyal to their marriage. Those who evolved that reaction to oxytocin were more likely to stay together and raise their children successfully to become healthy adults who would reproduce their parents’ new genes, so the pattern spread to the whole population of Heidelbergs and their descendants, ourselves.</p>
<p>My conclusion is an extension of the argument of my first blog, "The Theology and Science of Free Will." Humans have exercised free will, not just over their own actions, but also over their own evolution. Most of the biological evolution of the human line for the last two million years has resulted from the intentional innovations that the proto-humans made in their ways of feeding themselves, their technology, their social organization, their culture—and their morality. These evolutionary changes have enabled them to adapt more easily and willingly to the new socio-cultural environment that they have created for themselves, from the blushing response to shaming evolved by Erectus to signal their acceptance of the group’s point of view to the romantic feelings evolved by Heidelbergs to hold their marriages together.</p>Redesign Block Feature On Social Mediatag:atheistnexus.org,2018-05-07:2182797:BlogPost:27969962018-05-07T08:15:52.000ZCane Kostovskihttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/AtheistTech
<p>I would like to propose that the block feature be redesigned. If someone clicks on the block feature when trying to block someone on a public page, they need to go to a form that will collect relevant information and screen shots that will ONLY be seen by an elected committee of peers (Or hired social scientists with degrees) who will decide if the block is the right thing to do and implement the block for that person if it IS the right thing to do. I think the block feature as it is today…</p>
<p>I would like to propose that the block feature be redesigned. If someone clicks on the block feature when trying to block someone on a public page, they need to go to a form that will collect relevant information and screen shots that will ONLY be seen by an elected committee of peers (Or hired social scientists with degrees) who will decide if the block is the right thing to do and implement the block for that person if it IS the right thing to do. I think the block feature as it is today should be abolished in public groups/spaces on social media, not closed groups or an individual's page. When in the public arena, free speech is protected by law, but I would like it to extend to the private arena which these social medias are considered, or reclassify social media as a public forum. To continue the way it is today, it promotes the spread of the divisions of Tribal behaviors so much so that I see in the near future that even the public arena Free Speech will become a crime. Do you agree that Tribalism is running rampant on facebook, mewe, and minds? Do you agree that it could lead to the division of society so much so that nobody will listen to anybody? Do you agree that before social media, congress and society listened to both sides and compromised? Do you agree that Tribalism is teaching people how NOT to compromise? Do you agree that social media is to blame for our college kids asking authority to protect them from offensive ideas? Do you agree that nobody should be protected from offensive ideas unless it is an outright attack? What other ways can we fight Tribalism in social media?</p>Facing the endtag:atheistnexus.org,2018-05-05:2182797:BlogPost:27969832018-05-05T21:00:00.000ZAlan Perlmanhttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/AlanPerlman
<p>I had not meant to post again so soon, but circumstances compelled me. I'm writing partly in response to Joan Denoo's hopeful response that we atheists can do better in creating a world free of religious fantasy and conflict.</p>
<p>Maybe religion will retreat only so far and under certain conditions. Maybe we can't cause major change. I think it was Shimon Peres who said that if a condition resists all effort at change, perhaps it should be considered a permanent part of the…</p>
<p>I had not meant to post again so soon, but circumstances compelled me. I'm writing partly in response to Joan Denoo's hopeful response that we atheists can do better in creating a world free of religious fantasy and conflict.</p>
<p>Maybe religion will retreat only so far and under certain conditions. Maybe we can't cause major change. I think it was Shimon Peres who said that if a condition resists all effort at change, perhaps it should be considered a permanent part of the landscape.</p>
<p>So it is with religion and its merciless grip on the human mind. It offers an insane but for many irresistible solution to a largely inflated problem: death. So instead of preparing for the final curtain during adulthood (we don't have to frighten kids with it), people invest incalculable amounts of time in the machinations and gyrations of fantasy merchants who profess to solve the problem. It's all about fear of death, and once the the fantasy merchants hook into that, the deal is sealed.</p>
<p>Death came visiting, and no amount of prayer could dissuade him from taking the friend I just lost. College classmate, grad school roommate, gigantic intellect, magnanimous and good-humored, a real mensch who influenced hundreds, maybe thousands of people. A master writer and thinker. One year older than I. Three-year battle with cancer. I didn't know.</p>
<p>I didn't mourn my cold, withholding, lying mother. Said not a word at her funeral. But this loss I really feel. The first of my contemporaries and someone with whom I had a real connection - and was proud to know. </p>
<p>Humanists have to find constructive, empowering ways to deal with death. "Going to a better place" won't cut it. Opiate of the people, indeed!</p>
<p>Society, as B.F. Skinner observed, "attacks early, when the child is helpless." Religion taps into this primal fear of death and enslaves people their whole lives. And they buy it! Even Ultra-Light hypocrites like my brother attend synagogue a few days a year, just so God punches his ticket.</p>
<p>What's the atheist answer? Many approaches - all must be applied. Clear thinking is necessary. My stepson, incredibly, had a handle on it when he was nine. Asked what would happen to him after he died, he said, "It'll be just like before I was born." QED </p>
<p>I wanted to see what would happen when it came time for Rabbi Sherwin Wine -- a heroic atheist -- to die. But he was killed in car crash - a severe blow to many of us who loved and respected him.</p>
<p>Well, if you don't have Jesus, you need a plan. Along with mental practice, my death strategies include close friends and good drugs. After you're 70, you should get whatever drugs you need, so I expect Ecstasy (pure), LSD, and others to ease my passage. Dilaudid is great stuff. </p>
<p>Given the above, I should be able to go out with dignity and class -- no frightened deathbed conversions -- that is, unless some texting teenager hits me head-on tomorrow. You never know.</p>
<p>Any suggestions?</p>So, What If…?tag:atheistnexus.org,2018-05-04:2182797:BlogPost:27969642018-05-04T14:00:00.000ZLoren Millerhttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/LorenMiller
<p>It’s finally happened. The smoking gun has been discovered in unique, utterly new evidence, the data has been verified, all the tests confirm it … <strong>THERE IS A GOD.</strong> Now what? For me, beyond a shrug and a bit of bemusement, little or no change.<br></br> <br></br> <em>Oh, but aren’t you excited or thrilled? You see, we were right all along! Wassamatta, eating too much crow? Those sour grapes turning in your stomach?</em><br></br> <br></br> Nope, don’t like grapes and crow isn’t on my…</p>
<p>It’s finally happened. The smoking gun has been discovered in unique, utterly new evidence, the data has been verified, all the tests confirm it … <strong>THERE IS A GOD.</strong> Now what? For me, beyond a shrug and a bit of bemusement, little or no change.<br/> <br/> <em>Oh, but aren’t you excited or thrilled? You see, we were right all along! Wassamatta, eating too much crow? Those sour grapes turning in your stomach?</em><br/> <br/> Nope, don’t like grapes and crow isn’t on my diet. I just don’t see that the news is relevant to me.<br/> <br/> <em>Not relevant to you? It’s relevant to <strong>everyone!</strong></em><br/> <br/> Why? Because some Johnny-come-lately deity finally decided to leave a trace of him/her/itself for us to unearth? Seems to me far more likely that whoever he was, he got bent about people like me who rightfully challenged his existence for <em>lack</em> of evidence. Personally, I don’t’ see that this news improves things in any meaningful way. Indeed, I think things just got a whole lot worse.<br/> <br/> <em>But God is REAL now! Why would things be worse?</em><br/> <br/> Because now the world is no longer run on reason, cause and effect or logic. If that evidence had always been there all along, that would be one thing. It wasn’t. It amounted to an effect without a cause, or, if you will, a miracle. If one effect without a cause can happen, then any number of them can happen and with that, the world can potentially stop making sense altogether. With that discovery, reality as we know it can now be run by <em>WHIM</em>, by whatever transient impulse this deity might entertain. If science cannot penetrate the causation of the events this being spawns, then <strong>anything can happen</strong>, logical or not, beneficial or not, and humankind will be helpless to anticipate or understand it other than ultimately to determine that this newly-found god wanted it that way. Einstein once said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.” With the arrival of your hotshot supreme being, that is sadly out the window.<br/> <br/> <em>But our god is LOVE! He cares for us!</em><br/> <br/> Does he really? Tell that to the Amalekites, to the Amorites, the Midianites, and throw in the Moabites while you’re at it. Hell, tell it to the Israelites, who got jerked around by Yahweh almost as much as their enemies were. Tell it to Job, never mind his wife and kids, who all suffered for Job’s “blameless” and “upright” standing before the head honcho. Oh, and as for “gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” isn’t he the one who said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters--yes, even their own life--such a person cannot be my disciple?” If this is your god we’re dealing with, then your own holy book shows him to be the “capriciously malevolent bully” Richard Dawkins accused him of being. If I can avoid that fucker at all, I’ll be glad to.<br/> <br/> <em>Blasphemer! He’ll condemn you to hell for that!</em><br/> <br/> Oh? What happened to that god-of-love you were selling not but a few seconds ago? You guys go on about your god being a merciful, loving god, then a judging god with hardly a pause, failing to notice that the two are incompatible. Your buddy can either follow his own rules and stick with them consistently or pick and choose, again by whim, and forgive or condemn as he pleases. I’d gladly trust some old fart of a judge running night court before I’d put up with that brand of capriciousness.<br/> <br/> Look, you can be excited all you want. Knock yourself out, please. For myself, I am going to continue on as I have, doing the best I can, keeping my own house in order and hoping he either doesn’t notice me or doesn’t care, which I should note has been the pattern to date. And if he does notice me, I’d be dubious whether anything I can do or say from this point forward will either absolve or condemn me. It’s as I said before: he’s not relevant to what I’m doing in the here and now.<br/> <br/> I see no percentage in changing myself for his sake … and I won’t.</p>Is it OK to Use Cannabis? A Parent's Guidetag:atheistnexus.org,2018-05-04:2182797:BlogPost:27970372018-05-04T09:34:10.000ZSophia Mooreushttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/SophiaMooreus
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">With recreational</span> <a href="https://freebackgroundchecks.com/learn/cannabis-is-legal-in-the-us/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">marijuana legalized in nine states</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">and medical marijuana legal in more states than not, the subject of whether or not to use it as a parent or how to talk about it with your children may have come up. As a parent, you want to be informed – because who wants to sound like they don’t…</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">With recreational</span> <a href="https://freebackgroundchecks.com/learn/cannabis-is-legal-in-the-us/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">marijuana legalized in nine states</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">and medical marijuana legal in more states than not, the subject of whether or not to use it as a parent or how to talk about it with your children may have come up. As a parent, you want to be informed – because who wants to sound like they don’t have a clue in front of their teenager? But you want to be informed correctly so you can prepare your teen.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We have the information that you need to discuss this sensitive topic with your child. Read on.</span></p>
<h2><b>Should I Talk to My Child About Cannabis?</b></h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Of course! Unless you want your children getting their information from their school, friends, or worse, the internet, then you should definitely talk to your children about cannabis. How and at what age is completely up to you, though you and they should learn about all of the new laws.</span></p>
<h2><b>Cannabis Rumors</b></h2>
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Gateway Drug Myth – We’ve all heard this one. It’s a favorite of the anti-drug crowd. Cannabis leads to harder drugs. While it is statistically true that teens who use marijuana are more likely to use other drugs, correlation does not equal causation. There is literally no evidence linking the use of marijuana as a cause for the use of other drugs.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Addiction Myth – Compared to heroin, where 24% of users become addicted and cocaine, where 15% of users become dependent, marijuana has a very small percentage – just 9% of heavy users become dependent.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Prohibition Myth – Prohibition hasn’t been effective in preventing kids from using cannabis. But</span> <a href="https://www.thecrediblechoice.com/how/marijuana-legalization-pros-cons/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">the other side of that coin</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">is that even in states where marijuana is legal, kids are not using the drug any more than in states where it is still illegal.</span></li>
</ol>
<h2><b>Can Teenagers or Children Consume Medical Cannabis?</b></h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Laws vary from state to state, but it is possible for a physician to recommend to a parent that their child or teenager use medical marijuana. In some states, the parent must obtain the recommendation on behalf of a child and control the administration of the cannabis. In other states, a parent must obtain the recommendation of two physicians for medical marijuana for a child. If a physician has recommended cannabis for your child, one of the most efficient ways of</span> <a href="https://www.gotvape.com/desktop-vaporizers.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">administering the dose is via a desktop vaporizer</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, which can be inhaled from a bag or it can be used in a small room, imparting the cannabis into the air.</span></p>
<h2><b>Can Medical Marijuana Harm My Child or Teenager?</b></h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Study after study has proven that alcohol is about as twice as harmful as cannabis to the cannabis users. To others around the user, alcohol was five times more harmful than cannabis.</span></p>
<h2><b>Types of Cannabis</b></h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Here is where things get confusing. There are many different kinds of strains of marijuana and they have a lot of nicknames. There are three main forms of cannabis:</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Dabs – these can also be called wax or shatter or butter. This is either concentrated</span> <a href="https://www.leafscience.com/2017/11/22/thc-cbd-difference/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">THC or CBD</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">and is typically consumed using a dab rig or a nail or a wax pen vaporizer or vaporizer mod.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Dry Herb – dried marijuana flowers. This is generally broken apart or ground using a special grinder and put into a vaporizer, a bowl, a bong, a pipe, or rolled in a joint and then smoked.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Edibles – this is food infused with marijuana. It can also be cannabis-infused drinks.</span></p>
<h2><b>Therapeutic Use of Cannabis</b></h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cannabis has been used therapeutically for millennia. It has shown promise as a pain reliever, antidepressant, anxiolytic, anti-inflammatory, and in the treatment of epilepsy. Talking to your children about the different uses of marijuana can be a useful gateway to talking about health issues, politics, American history, and much more.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">If they don’t learn about it from you, they’re likely going to learn about it through experimentation or from their peers. If you have cannabis experience and you have a child in a legal state, talk to them about it like you would talk to them about using tobacco or alcohol. Then they can make an informed choice when they are of age.</span></p>National Day of Shametag:atheistnexus.org,2018-05-03:2182797:BlogPost:27967052018-05-03T21:00:00.000ZAlan Perlmanhttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/AlanPerlman
<p><em>All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.”</em></p>
<p><em>Tennessee</em> <em>Williams</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Hey, it’s National Day of Prayer! What are you atheists doing as your superstitious fellow-countrymen, led by a hypocrite who exemplifies their values in no way whatsoever, declare their obeisance to their Imaginary Friend, and ask him for lots of stuff?</p>
<p>Mel Brooks compared God to a Chinese waiter,…</p>
<p><em>All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.”</em></p>
<p><em>Tennessee</em> <em>Williams</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Hey, it’s National Day of Prayer! What are you atheists doing as your superstitious fellow-countrymen, led by a hypocrite who exemplifies their values in no way whatsoever, declare their obeisance to their Imaginary Friend, and ask him for lots of stuff?</p>
<p>Mel Brooks compared God to a Chinese waiter, feverishly rushing around, overwhelmed by the countless requests he gets. I could go on and on about how prayer makes no sense, how humans will not make true progress until, in the words of Emile Zola, “the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.”</p>
<p><strong>“We worship God”</strong></p>
<p>But you all know that. You also know that many of the Founders were outright atheists. Your stomach heaves as Orange Julius declares that “the Democrats worship government (ok so far) – but we worship God!” Never fails to evoke a passionate, animalistic roar.</p>
<p>That this is my country, with its Third World attachment to religion, fills me with shame. I bet other industrialized countries think we’re a bunch of rubes.</p>
<p>So far, the founding ideals have turned out to be too much of a stretch: religion should have no place in public life -- that was assumed, unfortunately not by everyone. Still, the Founders said nothing about how religion must permeate every aspect of public and political life. And therefore – cue First Amendment -- the government must be uninvolved with religion in every way, certainly not endorsing it from the Presidential podium. </p>
<p><strong>Trust in God -- NOT</strong></p>
<p>“In God we trust” is a simple, stupid lie. If the Founders had stuck with that, we’d all be speaking with British accents (that’s not all bad).</p>
<p>I haven’t seen an exegesis of prayer better than George Carlin’s. He tried praying to God, but his prayers were answered only 50% of the time. No point in that. On a logical, physical basis, George endorsed sun worship: look at all the good things Apollo gives us. But he doesn’t answer our prayers.</p>
<p>Carlin descends into total absurdity by settling on Joe Peschi, a guy who can get things done.</p>
<p>Don’t these idiots understand that a hundred other cultures and societies are praying to their gods, often for the destruction of us?</p>
<p><strong>The right-hand page</strong></p>
<p>My own shame began when I started reading the right-hand page of the Jewish prayer book (Hebrew on the left). A small part consists of actually asking God for anything. It’s mostly humiliating ass-kissing. And they repeat this, day after day after day… </p>
<p>C’mon homo sapiens, accent on the second word. You can do better.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Happy Prayer Day!</p>Just made my first atheist video for YouTube! THANKS TO YOU!tag:atheistnexus.org,2018-04-30:2182797:BlogPost:27967402018-04-30T05:58:24.000ZCompelledunbelieverhttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/Compelledunbeliever
<p> When I first came out as an atheist I came to A/N and met a great community. I used the moniker compelledunbeliever because I was afraid to let anyone know that I was an atheist. After interacting with this community I became more confident and began to mention that I was an atheist in my community. Then I began a atheist website to encourage atheist to come out in my community, I began to be more vocal on the web, responding to media etc, using my own name.</p>
<p> I would like to…</p>
<p> When I first came out as an atheist I came to A/N and met a great community. I used the moniker compelledunbeliever because I was afraid to let anyone know that I was an atheist. After interacting with this community I became more confident and began to mention that I was an atheist in my community. Then I began a atheist website to encourage atheist to come out in my community, I began to be more vocal on the web, responding to media etc, using my own name.</p>
<p> I would like to thank Brother Richard, and everyone here for helping me to have the audacity to actually do a little more to help others that are questioning god. This was my first time attempting to make a video. I had to learn all the software( I still don't know squat), learn YouTube nuances, push myself to publish, though to me i look like a fool on camera, and build up the gumption to actually publish. It has been terrifying. Thank you again for helping me to have the confidence to make it happen!</p>
<p>Please check it out and let me know what you think!</p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED7gLkURMHs">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED7gLkURMHs</a></p>My quote about godtag:atheistnexus.org,2018-04-21:2182797:BlogPost:27959692018-04-21T02:21:22.000ZDouglas Monkahttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/DouglasMonka
<p><strong><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Love requires the existence of a material partnership base on communication, among other important factors. The fact the god does not communicate back in an easily recognizable way proves of it's non-existence. Being in love with god would be like being in love with a fictional character. That clearly is not love!</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-size: 14pt;">by Doug Monka</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Love requires the existence of a material partnership base on communication, among other important factors. The fact the god does not communicate back in an easily recognizable way proves of it's non-existence. Being in love with god would be like being in love with a fictional character. That clearly is not love!</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-size: 14pt;">by Doug Monka</span></strong></p>Hopefultag:atheistnexus.org,2018-04-21:2182797:BlogPost:27959672018-04-21T02:05:12.000ZDouglas Monkahttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/DouglasMonka
<p><span style="font-size: 24pt;"><strong><span style="font-size: 14pt;">I ma hopeful to get to know some of you. Become on-line friends. Talk politics, religion, and philosophy. These are things one are not suppose to speak about, but during the age of Trump I don't know how you can avoid it. I am 55 years old, and skeptical since I was nine years old. I got a slap on the face from my mother. Then she told me I am going to church, and I do believe in god. Nice,…</span></strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 24pt;"><strong><span style="font-size: 14pt;">I ma hopeful to get to know some of you. Become on-line friends. Talk politics, religion, and philosophy. These are things one are not suppose to speak about, but during the age of Trump I don't know how you can avoid it. I am 55 years old, and skeptical since I was nine years old. I got a slap on the face from my mother. Then she told me I am going to church, and I do believe in god. Nice, hey?</span></strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 24pt;"><strong><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/k3g9jrXKpmm9V26VJ9iNNVYxVptSBGTJpTmlyrAhhTX59kmHKwnkgzIxcGXatiTrK3LX3VMg0g7VD0BGNF3mIOSDpmfMgKFr/quoteabouttheloveofgodbyDug.pdf" target="_self">quoteabouttheloveofgod%20by%20Dug.pdf</a></span></strong></span></p>Krauss, Silverman, and Feet of Claytag:atheistnexus.org,2018-04-16:2182797:BlogPost:27958512018-04-16T14:15:17.000ZLoren Millerhttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/LorenMiller
<p><em>Too many of my heroes have feet of clay!</em><br></br> -- Joan Denoo<br></br> <br></br> It was late February, 2018 when I first learned about issues regarding Lawrence Krauss and his inappropriate behavior toward women. Then in the first week of March, I got an email from American Atheists, indicating that David Silverman was being suspended from the presidency of that organization, pending an investigation. One week later, I learned that he has been removed from that position. In both cases, the…</p>
<p><em>Too many of my heroes have feet of clay!</em><br/> -- Joan Denoo<br/> <br/> It was late February, 2018 when I first learned about issues regarding Lawrence Krauss and his inappropriate behavior toward women. Then in the first week of March, I got an email from American Atheists, indicating that David Silverman was being suspended from the presidency of that organization, pending an investigation. One week later, I learned that he has been removed from that position. In both cases, the only forthcoming source of details regarding both Krauss and Silverman is Buzzfeed, a website which while it lacks the serious mien of NPR or CBS News has apparently sufficient credibility to move multiple organizations to take punitive action against both individuals.<br/> <br/> This is hardly the beginning of the problems associated with the atheist movement and untoward behavior. Rebecca Watson and the “ElevatorGate” incident dates back to 2011, with repercussions which continue to have impact to this day. Michael Shermer of <em>Skeptic</em> magazine has similarly been skewered by Buzzfeed, along with other luminaries of atheism as a part of the rising #MeToo movement. Observations regarding the participation of women in atheism and questions regarding their treatment have been rife ever since Ms. Watson’s aforementioned complaint and possibly before then. Even as the fundamentalists have had their Jim &amp; Tammy Fae Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, those of us who espouse no faith are now forced to acknowledge that our side of the ledger is not above problematic behavior. The superficially clean and shiny image of atheism has, perhaps predictably, run headlong into the reality of human frailty. It’s our turn for a wake-up call.<br/> <br/> The most obvious question at this point is: What do we do about this? Do we throw Krauss and Silverman and the others like them under the bus and move on without them? Some atheists already have in Krauss’ case, and I personally think such action is both presumptuous and foolish. The truths which Krauss has elucidated, whether about cosmology or atheism, do not become invalidated simply because his behavior with women is reprehensible. The same may be said for Silverman’s unremitting assault on irrational belief. The fact is that our societal rules dictate that they are both, at least for the time being, <em>personae non gratae</em>, and as such will be rendered out of the public eye for some prescribed period of time as a part of any effort to rehabilitate them, if that can indeed be accomplished. It is worthy of note that both the Bakkers and Swaggart were ultimately accepted again by their followers at varying rates, though it may also be said that their subculture as a rule is far less critical of such <em>faux pas</em> as ours may be.<br/> <br/> But to speak to Ms. Denoo’s quote above, ultimately moving forward from these incidents means at least in part that, while we may have people we admire, whose words we wish we had spoken ourselves, we have to acknowledge that we are all human and we all fuck up, including and especially our heroes. We need to recognize that to best represent atheism, we first need to be our authentic selves and not merely fans in a fan club. We need to keep our own houses in order and be examples of decent human beings who just happen not to believe in ghosts or fairies … or deities.<br/> <br/> Rather than having a few public atheist standard bearers who carry the weight of the movement, perhaps each of us should be our own upright representative of godlessness and share that weight, remembering that we all have feet of clay, but can all aspire to grow and become better together.</p>How not to write a persuasive speechtag:atheistnexus.org,2018-04-13:2182797:BlogPost:27955142018-04-13T03:16:52.000ZRhonda Boyerhttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/RhondaBoyer949
<p>I am supposed to give a persuasive speech for my oral communications class, and it is going to be about how expanding your experiences can improve your ability to decide on a major for college.It sounded like a good topic, and I think the people in my class could benefit from it,as we are all students, and I am pretty sure some of us haven't decided. </p>
<p>I know that experience should help someone know what they are interested in. However, I have found, it really clouded up the decision…</p>
<p>I am supposed to give a persuasive speech for my oral communications class, and it is going to be about how expanding your experiences can improve your ability to decide on a major for college.It sounded like a good topic, and I think the people in my class could benefit from it,as we are all students, and I am pretty sure some of us haven't decided. </p>
<p>I know that experience should help someone know what they are interested in. However, I have found, it really clouded up the decision making process. The more options I had, the worse it got. I couldn't make a decision for years, and at one point, decided to give up. I was sure I would never make up my mind.</p>
<p>I do realize I have made up my mind, eventually. I also think the extra experiences led me to think of nutrition. That didn't happen for me until I had the weight loss through better diet and increased activity and fitness experience. So, maybe that means this experience thing works. Slowly for me, it worked. Honestly, I wish I made this decision years ago. But, if I had, I might not have gone to culinary school. I might not have gone to Italy. I might not have met the people I met, and learned the things about myself I have learned. </p>
<p>Does this mean I don't have trouble figuring out how to write this paper, or how to get these other students to understand there really isn't a good substitute for the experiences, and the time it takes to make a good decision? Maybe. But, I feel I should be honest with them about how I frequently felt I might have been wasting my time along the way. I don't feel the experiences were wasted time. I know so much more now that I did. I still don't feel like I have done anything more than scratched the surface on all of the things a human could possibly ever learn. I do know, though, that I am a bit farther down the road, and no more foolish than I was when I started. </p>
<p>All we have, at the end of the day, is whatever we have experienced. We mean what we mean to the people who care about us. And, our lives are worth whatever we decide they mean. I can't tell these people anything they do not want to know, can't teach them anything they don't want to learn. All I feel like I can do is share what I think is what, with facts behind it,and hope it is enough. Either that, or just attempt to make sure I get a decent grade....Just kidding. I hope it helps them think, and figure out the end of the world doesn't come from not knowing at 18 to 24 years old what you want to be when you grow up. I sure had no idea. And, I think I didn't turn out horrible.</p>The Theology and Science of Free Willtag:atheistnexus.org,2018-04-11:2182797:BlogPost:27954162018-04-11T20:09:47.000ZHomer Edward Pricehttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/HomerEdwardPrice730
<p><span>Christian theologians see</span> <span>free will</span> <span>as the ability of the soul to choose freely between good and evil actions, as defined by God’s law. They argue that the choice of an evil action is a sin against God and justifies Divine punishment in Hell. To add mercy to their terrible image of God, they assert that Christ’s blood provides salvation from Hell for the sinful soul. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span>My purpose In this…</span></p>
<p><span>Christian theologians see</span> <span>free will</span> <span>as the ability of the soul to choose freely between good and evil actions, as defined by God’s law. They argue that the choice of an evil action is a sin against God and justifies Divine punishment in Hell. To add mercy to their terrible image of God, they assert that Christ’s blood provides salvation from Hell for the sinful soul. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span>My purpose In this essay is to reanalyze the Christian theologians’ definition of free will in order to make it meaningful for secular, scientific purposes. I will distinguish among will, free will, willed action, and the social reaction to the willed action.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span> <span>I define will</span> <span>as <span style="text-decoration: underline;">conscious intentions</span> which the individual has the capacity to carry into action. Many deniers of free will seem to be saying that human beings have no wills at all. They insist that consciousness is an illusion and that it has no influence on human action.(1) They realize that this belief is contrary to all human experience, but since experience is a product of consciousness, they do not think experience has any validity either.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> However, scientific psychological experiments have been shown to confirm common experience.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> A recent review citied many examples of experiments demonstrating that ideas verbally communicated to the volunteer subjects, and thereby entering their consciousness, subsequently affected their behavior.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span>If we pay attention to our own experience and to the research and choose to believe that humans do have wills, we can then ask whether their wills are free. It is the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">prefrontal cortex</span> of the human brain that normally forms our conscious intentions. But</span> <span>conscious intentions</span> are not free<span>,</span> <span>I would say, if they are fully determined by forces coming from outside of one’s prefrontal cortex that cannot be modified, moderated, redirected, or blocked by the prefrontal cortex before they are carried into action.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> A good example of this is addiction to some substance or activity.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> Addiction is well understood by neurologists, who can trace the exact circuits in the brain that it activates. These circuits create an intense craving to consume the substance or engage in the activity the person is addicted to, or in my terms, they impose an irresistible conscious intention to do it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> Another consequence of this addictive system is the weakening of the ability of the prefrontal cortex in the human brain to perform its normal functions of forming, modifying, moderating, redirecting, or blocking conscious intentions and actions in light of their expected consequences. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> So it seems to me that the deniers of free will are saying that all human behavior is determined in the same way that addictive behavior is.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> (</span>Another process in which conscious intentions are formed by outside influence and carried into action without further internal conscious processing might be hypnotism, but I know little about how that works.) I will wait for neurologists to demonstrate that all behavior is caused by something similar to addiction or hypnotism before I believe it.(2)</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span>One of the reasons that I doubt this thesis is that addictive behavior by definition is dysfunctional and maladaptive.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> It causes harm to the addict and to other people, unless it is successfully treated.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> Normally,</span> <span>intentional human action</span> <span>under the control of the prefrontal cortex is, by contrast, <span style="text-decoration: underline;">functional and adaptive</span> in that it generally promotes individual and even group well-being, survival and reproduction.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> And it does this, not as a result of genetically programmed instincts, but as a result of learning the culture of the group and gaining individual experience, both of which are products of trial and error experimentation leading to repetition of successful action, as well as of conscious modeling of the potential consequences of action. In simple organisms, trial and error learning may occur unconsciously,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> but even in the brain of the proverbial rat in a maze, conscious decision making is going on; mental modeling of the consequences of running in each direction when it arrives at a familiar intersection in the maze has been conclusively shown in the rat’s brain in the laboratory.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> Rats are really not that different from humans: We both consciously form intentions and act upon them. We both make choices.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span>One thing that humans have that rats do not is a system of social control exercised by human groups over their members, in other words, a system of morality.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> But the prescriptions and proscriptions of human moral systems, that is,</span> <span>their <span style="text-decoration: underline;">definitions of good and evil</span>,</span> <span><span style="text-decoration: underline;">are widely variable</span>.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span> <span>I</span><span>n some cultures, husbands have customarily been expected to share their wives with overnight adult male visitors.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> In others, women have customarily been confined within their homes and have not been allowed to be seen by men who are not their relatives.(3) That is the point of requiring women who go outside of their homes to wear burkas. Furthermore, husbands have had the power to divorce their wives at will and to keep custody of the children.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> In another cultural pattern, the women in their kinship groups control the land where they have their houses and grow gardens to feed their families. A wife may divorce her husband simply by putting his shoes outside the door to indicate that he is expected to walk away.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In any case, he has little responsibility for or claim to his children. Their uncle, their mother’s brother, has the responsibility for raising them, along with their mother. In addition, t<span class="Apple-converted-space">he senior women from the various kinship groups have the right to choose the new chief from among the leading men of the tribe.</span></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span>Regardless of the culture, the majority of its members will internalize its rules as part of their group identity, form the intention of obeying them, and enforce them on the others.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> If an individual member acts in a way that violates the prevailing moral rules,</span> <span><span style="text-decoration: underline;">social disapproval</span></span> <span>will be brought to bear upon him or her, including gossip, direct criticism, shunning and ostracism by the other members of his group or, in the extreme case, expulsion from the group, forcing him to wander alone without social support.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> These social punishments, short of expulsion, are intended to bring the offending individual back into line with the expectations of society and deter other members from committing similar offenses.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> None of this would do any good unless the rule violators had the capacity to alter their own behavior.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> In other words, unless they had the free will to chose to act differently than they had in the past on order to regain acceptance in their group, social control would be impossible, and the group would become disorganized and unable to function as a cooperative social unit.(4) Humans have had to evolve the free will to chose to conform to the culture of their group, rather than being disruptive, in order for us to become the spectacularly successful social species that we are. We are now so numerous and voracious for resources that we are on the verge of overwhelming all other aspects of nature.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span>The Christian mythology of God, heaven, and hell functions to reinforce the conformity of individual Christians to the peculiar Christian version of morality, including the expectation that all adults except monks and nuns should marry one person of the opposite sex in order to procreate children, stay married to that person for the rest of their lives, and never have sex with anyone else. If no one had the free will to chose to act in this unnatural way, out of fear of hell or hope of heaven, there would be no Christians and no Christianity.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Footnotes</strong></p>
<p></p>
<p><span>(1) The LIbet experiment has been widely misinterpreted as proving the thesis that human consciousness has no effect on human behavior. In that experiment, volunteers were asked to move a finger on either hand at random, not deciding when to do it, but recording the time when they realized that they were going to do it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> It turned out that they were aware of the upcoming motion before it happened, but the nerve impulses that caused the movement had actually begun before they were aware of it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> One obvious implication of this experiment is that human consciousness at least reliably records what the brain is going to do, if a little tardily.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> More importantly and less obviously, nothing would have happened at all in the experiment without the mediation of human consciousness.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> The volunteers would not have shown up if they had not consciously become aware of the call for experimental participants or not decided consciously to respond to it. Even if they had shown up, their fingers would have done nothing if they had not consciously heard the experimenter’s instructions and formed the conscious intention of following them, in this case by consciously reprograming their brain’s unconscious motor system to produce the desired behavior. (It is this last process that intrigues me. It deserves more research.)</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span>(2) </span><span>For most of my long life, my own free will was suppressed by a different process.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> I </span>introjected into my own mind my mother's expectations of me, as a result of her continual repetition of them and my anxiety about her acceptance of me, even though, in freely forming my own values at the same time, I saw the manipulative and over-controlling way that my mother treated me and the girlish standards of social behavior she imposed upon me as profoundly immoral. For instance, she demanded that I tell what little girls would call “white lies” without calling them that herself or explaining the difference between white lies and “black lies,” to coin a phrase. On top of that, my mother insisted that what I thought, even about what I wanted or what I liked, was always wrong, and that she always knew better.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> And most importantly, she drilled into my mind the admonition, “Always do what the other person expects,” which by implication also meant to me, “Always want and like and think what the other person expects.” These various injunctions often overruled my own judgement and my own desires, and therefore my own intentions to act, even though I hated her for her commands and hated doing what she had commanded and hated myself for doing it. With much effort over recent decades I have broken free of the cage she built around me, but my fraught relationship with her still has lingering emotional effects. (I should add that the one freedom that my mother gave me was freedom of religion, and I used the free will I still had to become an atheist in my teens. It was not a result of my rebellion against her.)</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span>(3) </span><span>This pattern is not required by Islam.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> It is found in some Muslim societies and not in others, and it is also found in some Hindu groups in India.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> It is based on cultural tradition and not on religion.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span>(4) </span><span>Philosophers of punishment write as if they believe that only criminals have no free will.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> So stated, there may well be a partial truth in that, but it is a criminological hypothesis rather a philosophical proposition.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> Half of the people incarcerated in American prisons are mentally ill.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> But many other people decide to commit crimes because they think they can avoid being caught.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span>(</span><span>5) The celibacy of Catholic parish priests, bishops, etc., is not a requirement based on religious principles, but a bureaucratic convenience, imposed only in the western European church a thousand years after the founding of Christianity.</span></p>Another Passover: Jews indulge in food and fantasytag:atheistnexus.org,2018-04-01:2182797:BlogPost:27949242018-04-01T17:30:00.000ZAlan Perlmanhttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/AlanPerlman
<p><em>"I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out."</em></p>
<p><em>Denis Diderot</em></p>
<p><em>“Imagine the religious principles which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded that they are anything but sick men’s dreams.”</em></p>
<p><em>David Hume</em></p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>The Non-Event</strong></p>
<p>Another Passover is upon us. Jews around the world celebrate their founding…</p>
<p><em>"I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out."</em></p>
<p><em>Denis Diderot</em></p>
<p><em>“Imagine the religious principles which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded that they are anything but sick men’s dreams.”</em></p>
<p><em>David Hume</em></p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>The Non-Event</strong></p>
<p>Another Passover is upon us. Jews around the world celebrate their founding myth, the central reason for their identity, and very importantly, because its bloody repercussions persist to this day, their divine right to a piece of land.</p>
<p>It seems obvious to modern-day Jews that the Passover story was about freedom, but this concept, so prominent in contemporary celebrations, was unknown to the Bronze Age shepherd-farmers whose culture the Torah reflects. The Israelites themselves owned slaves. What the Torah says, in several places, is that God did it all for his own glory. </p>
<p>(Upon reflection, the Old Testament God bears striking resemblances to The Donald: selfish, preening, capricious, vengeful, violent, autocratic, rewards loyalty and punishes disloyalty, plays favorites -- and does it all for his own glory.)</p>
<p>Passover is another example of blended holidays. Just as Christians decided that Jesus was born at the time of the Roman Saturnalia, Jews grafted their redemption tale onto an already-existing spring festival called <em>Pesakh</em>. The word refers to the skipping dance the shepherds did to encourage their flock to breed. Traces of this ancient festival remain in Passover -- <em>e.g.,</em> the interchangeability of "Passover" and "Pesakh'"; the parsley and the egg on the Seder plate. The egg is symbolically equivalent to an Easter egg. </p>
<p><strong>Holiday at home – no rabbi needed!</strong></p>
<p>This holiday is entrusted to the Jewish laity in their homes – no rabbi needed, Same for Succoth, the holiday where Jews build little structures in their back yards, to pretend for a little while that they are not pampered suburbanites but hardy desert trekkers, on the way to the Promised Land.</p>
<p>Kinda makes you wonder why they don’t do that for all of Judaism. It would kill the rabbi job market, that’s why. It would eliminate the middleman.</p>
<p>Plus, even if you could create home-guides for other holidays like Tisha B’Av, the High Holidays, and Simchat Torah (where they celebrate finishing the Torah—and then start all over again!), you still need a congregation to reinforce the groupthink and make everyone feel religious instead of psychotic.</p>
<p>(Irreverent question: Does it ever occur to any rabbi, even for a moment, that “Holy shit, I’m up here babbling gibberish to nobody”? Never a moment’s doubt?)</p>
<p>Full instructions for the Seder (ritual dinner), along with the story itself, are provided, in a book called the Hagaddah, which comes in many different lengths and variations. For years, Maxwell House distributed one at Passover time - a booklet of no more than 100 pages -- along with its (presumably) kosher-for-Passover coffee..</p>
<p><strong>South Philly memories</strong> </p>
<p>I vividly recall the Seders at my grandparents' row house in South Philly. Tables placed end-to-end and laden with knishes (three kinds!), matzo ball chicken soup, chopped liver, gefilte fish -- the whole palette of Sara Schwartz' culinary art,</p>
<p>While she stayed in the kitchen putting the finishing touches on the meal, grandfather Hymie would sit at the head of the table, reading the Hebrew Hagaddah, gamely trying to get through it, flipping pages amid cries of ":C'mon, Pop, we're hungry!" </p>
<p>There are fifteen steps in the traditional Seder. You can't eat until the entire exodus story is recounted. Needless to say, we skipped a few. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_Nishtana" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Four Questions</a> are never skipped. As the youngest, I was supposed to recite them, but the first time, I had such stage fright that my Uncle Mike stepped in.</p>
<p>If length is optional, observant Jews regard more as better. After the final set of songs -- and I couldn't have put it any better than Wikipedia -- "those who are still awake may recite the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_Songs" title="Song of Songs">Song of Songs</a>, engage in Torah learning, or continue talking about the events of the Exodus until sleep overtakes them."</p>
<p>Two of my wife's sisters married rabbis, and they led just such marathons. Those Seders could go on for five hours. </p>
<p><strong>None of it happened.</strong></p>
<p>As for me, well, when I found out that none of it happened…I lost all motivation for celebrating non-events. I left all of that Exodus crap behind – and never looked back (at one point, God kills 24,000 Israelites in a plague, for whoring with Midianite women; hey, can’t a guy get laid out here?).</p>
<p>Passover and the High Holidays are when highly observant Jews go into a frenzy. All because the Jews baked unleavened bread in their haste to leave Egypt, today's Jews can't eat any leavened products for a week. You can't even have them in your house. Jews go after them with toothbrushes, determined to remove every crumb. Ho-lee shit!</p>
<p>And remember: more is better. You can't eat legumes, for some obscure reason. Foods of all kinds are forbidden unless they are produced and blessed "kosher for Passover." A whole new set of Passover crockery and utensils is required. </p>
<p><strong>Paper frogs and real history</strong></p>
<p>My wife tells of making paper frogs to symbolize one of the plagues. Every year the Haggadah’s joy in other people’s suffering becomes more distasteful to me (ten drops of wine are dripped out to sympathize with the poor Egyptians).</p>
<p>Thinking about the real history makes me LMAO. The Jews were a primitive tribe of shepherds and farmers. Egypt was the Middle Eastern superpower of its day. Imagine Somali pirates attacking the US Navy.</p>
<p>Any exodus from slavery probably resulted from captivity, which in turn resulted from attacking the fringes of the Egyptian empire. But in the Torah, a 430-year, master-slave relationship between Jews and Egyptians was fabricated out of whole cloth. The Jews did not build the pyramids. They were not slaves in Egypt. They weren't even in Egypt.</p>
<p>Before they were enslaved, the story goes, the Jews did rather well in Egypt, after Joseph correctly interpreted the Pharaoh’s dreams. If Joseph was such an influential adviser to the Pharaoh, don’t you think the Egyptian historians and record keepers would have noticed?</p>
<p>What does it say about a religion that its founding myth bears no relation whatever to discoverable reality? At least the Muslims have an actual historical figure (who rode up to heaven on a white horse).</p>
<p><strong>Do you believe?</strong></p>
<p>What it says…is that here, in the Exodus story, is another dividing line between belief and non-belief. Do you believe the fundamental myth or not? If you are a true believer, yes: you probably manage to do the same group-reinforced mental programming that keeps the Torah intact as a true account of the history of the Jews. If you doubt, keep it to yourself.</p>
<p><strong>Don't get it</strong></p>
<p>Celebrating actual events, e.g., July 4th, makes sense, although no politician ever talks about liberty on the 4th (or the rest of the year). But why celebrate things that didn't happen and act as if they did? As my brother (Judaism Ultra-Lite) points out, it's an excuse for a good meal. Granted, but like the Jews wandering in the desert, what a hell of a long way to get there!</p>
<p>.</p>Happy Easter, Bloody Eastertag:atheistnexus.org,2018-03-31:2182797:BlogPost:27948542018-03-31T15:00:00.000ZAlan Perlmanhttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/AlanPerlman
<p><em>“In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it,<br></br> You’ll be the grandest lady in the Easter Parade…</em></p>
<p><em>On the Avenue, Fifth Avenue, photographers will snap us</em><br></br> <em>And you’ll find that you’re in the rotogravure…”</em></p>
<p><em>Irving Berlin</em></p>
<p><em>“They tried to nail him down, but he got away.”</em></p>
<p><em>Marquee outside church in Massachusetts</em></p>
<p>Well, it’s that day again, and our Greek Orthodox friends, as well as our Roman…</p>
<p><em>“In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it,<br/> You’ll be the grandest lady in the Easter Parade…</em></p>
<p><em>On the Avenue, Fifth Avenue, photographers will snap us</em><br/> <em>And you’ll find that you’re in the rotogravure…”</em></p>
<p><em>Irving Berlin</em></p>
<p><em>“They tried to nail him down, but he got away.”</em></p>
<p><em>Marquee outside church in Massachusetts</em></p>
<p>Well, it’s that day again, and our Greek Orthodox friends, as well as our Roman Catholic brethren and sistren, are celebrating the most bizarre and barbaric events, the darkest, ghastliest nook of their religion: Easter.</p>
<p>Easter, dating back to a 3,000-year-old pagan spring ritual, is now about blood, suffering, sacrifice, more blood and suffering, and — what people come to church for: religion’s heroin and cocaine — the defiance of death.</p>
<p>It is perhaps the most excruciating of ironies that “Easter Parade” was written by a Russian Jew. Berlin’s lyrics describe Happy Easter – smiling kids, new clothes, chocolate bunnies, egg hunts, everything at Walgreens is pink, white, purple, or yellow. My neighbor has a giant inflatable pink bunny on his front lawn.<a id="more-60" name="more-60"></a></p>
<p>As a child, I helped my parents assemble Easter baskets for the Gentile customers of our drug store. And I supposed they would all go to church, marvel at the Resurrection, and have massive brunches, with lots of ham.</p>
<p>Spring is here and it’s a happy time of year.</p>
<p><strong>Bloody Easter</strong></p>
<p>But not for all of us. To a Jewish humanist, Easter is when Christians engage in some of their creepiest, ghastliest, most gruesome beliefs and practices. It’s when they get in touch with their inner Mel Gibson. The color of this Easter is red, as in blood.</p>
<p>First there is the communion ritual, which is primitive and barbaric in the extreme. I refer to transubstantiation, the consumption of the body and blood of Christ, a practice engaged in by Jesus at the Last Supper.</p>
<p>Whoa! Don’t they know they’re practicing an ancient form of tribal cannibalism? Just read <em>The Clan of the Cave Bear</em> for a description of the primitive practice of killing and eating the god/totem (in this case, a bear).</p>
<p>Actual cannibalism persists to this very day. I find it astonishing that so many supposedly sophisticated people solemnly carry it out in symbolic form.</p>
<p><strong>More blood</strong></p>
<p>Then there’s the persecution. Easter was generally an awful time for Jews, as Christians used Jesus’ (probably fabricated) story as an excuse to indulge their worst impulses. I once read that in Charlemagne’s time, one was supposed to seek out a Jew and box his ears, thereby perhaps causing permanent hearing damage.</p>
<p>And there was much worse. Tortures, crucifixions, burnings…truly, much of the blood of Easter is Jewish.</p>
<p><strong>More blood</strong></p>
<p>One of the main reasons all this Jewish blood was shed was blood itself: for centuries, Christians tortured and massacred Jews because of the unspeakable “blood libel:” the lie that Jews used the blood of Christian children for one ritual purpose or another, typically to make the Passover matzo. For more on this lie and the untold misery that it caused, go to</p>
<p><a href="http://http//www.zionism-israel.com/his/judeophobia6.htm">http://www.zionism-israel.com/his/judeophobia6.htm</a></p>
<p>I think the tragedy of the blood libel is both ironic and hypocritical, since it’s the communion-taking Christians who are the ones drinking blood!</p>
<p><strong>More blood</strong></p>
<p>Besides the blood libel, what are Christians so enraged about? The answer is right in front of us: the passion of the Christ. After centuries of passion plays, Mel Gibson has topped them all with a truly hideous rendition of a — I repeat, probably made-up — story.</p>
<p>Christians should know — but most don’t — that the story of Jesus is far from unique. Many ancient Near Eastern demi-gods were sacrificed and resurrected, but only one of them got to be at the center of a world religion. If instead the cult of Mithra had somehow taken over, people would probably still be celebrating the Resurrection, because it was the same story line!</p>
<p>I had resolved that I would not see Gibson’s movie, and I have not. But it was a significant part of Brian Fleming’s brilliant documentary “The God Who Wasn’t There.”</p>
<p><strong>Christian porn</strong></p>
<p>If there is such a thing as Christian pornography, this is it.</p>
<p>The similarities are remarkable. Just as with sexual porn (but unlike most legitimate movies), the title tells you exactly what you are going to see. Like porn, this movie is intended to arouse a specific base emotion, and, like porn, with its explicit focus on throbbing genitals, it pursues that purpose with relentless intensity. Like porn, it is a non-story where only one thing happens.</p>
<p>In his doc, Fleming rapidly goes through the movie at accelerated speed, with scrolling words that, minute by minute, describe each gory shot and act of violence. The scrolling words are superimposed on snippets from the movie.</p>
<p>As with porn, the first few minutes are quiet, but then the movie really gets down to business. Fleming notes the close-up of a nail being driven into Jesus’ hand — and resulting blood-spurt. He points out the care that Gibson must’ve taken to arrange such a “money shot” (my term) and create that spurt. No effort was spared to give us a close-up of 90 minutes of sadism and suffering.</p>
<p>And its effect must be only to inflame the most primitive parts of Christians’ brains, to the good of no one and the detriment of many.</p>
<p><strong>Happy Easter, bloody Easter</strong></p>
<p>Happy Easter, bloody Easter. Lillies spattered with the blood of those killed in the name of a man who supposedly preached peace and nonviolence — and who perhaps didn’t even exist. All of that rage and anger to no purpose. And to inflame it further with the images of modern cinematic technology is an outrageous act of moral irresponsibility.</p>
<p>The worst thing that Christians have done with Christmas is to commercialize it. That’s nothing compared with the dark underbelly of Easter: centuries of blood, barbarism, and death.</p>THIS!tag:atheistnexus.org,2018-03-26:2182797:BlogPost:27945142018-03-26T03:27:16.000ZCane Kostovskihttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/AtheistTech
<p><a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/Jr9dc1-2-I0FwArWPNZHmdUPAOe4057glcWJGoo0dofPyVDDY-FIEHFLwIRYXC2FjT8bKFMmJbMgY3PX*cqKPRawt02XB7i2/photo.jpg" target="_self"><img src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/Jr9dc1-2-I0FwArWPNZHmdUPAOe4057glcWJGoo0dofPyVDDY-FIEHFLwIRYXC2FjT8bKFMmJbMgY3PX*cqKPRawt02XB7i2/photo.jpg" width="480" class="align-full"/></a></p>
<p><a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/Jr9dc1-2-I0FwArWPNZHmdUPAOe4057glcWJGoo0dofPyVDDY-FIEHFLwIRYXC2FjT8bKFMmJbMgY3PX*cqKPRawt02XB7i2/photo.jpg" target="_self"><img src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/Jr9dc1-2-I0FwArWPNZHmdUPAOe4057glcWJGoo0dofPyVDDY-FIEHFLwIRYXC2FjT8bKFMmJbMgY3PX*cqKPRawt02XB7i2/photo.jpg" width="480" class="align-full"/></a></p>14th Amendment - history's most radical ideastag:atheistnexus.org,2018-03-22:2182797:BlogPost:27942792018-03-22T00:21:01.000ZCane Kostovskihttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/AtheistTech
<p><a href="http://bigthink.com/videos/van-jones-14th-amendment-is-one-of-historys-most-radical-ideas" target="_blank" rel="noopener">http://bigthink.com/videos/van-jones-14th-amendment-is-one-of-historys-most-radical-ideas</a></p>
<p></p>
<p>He's right, we don't talk about it enough. How many of you know what the 14th amendment even says? I didn't know until he told me in his video.</p>
<p><a href="http://bigthink.com/videos/van-jones-14th-amendment-is-one-of-historys-most-radical-ideas" target="_blank" rel="noopener">http://bigthink.com/videos/van-jones-14th-amendment-is-one-of-historys-most-radical-ideas</a></p>
<p></p>
<p>He's right, we don't talk about it enough. How many of you know what the 14th amendment even says? I didn't know until he told me in his video.</p>Review: Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry Kasparovtag:atheistnexus.org,2018-03-19:2182797:BlogPost:27940852018-03-19T22:53:35.000ZRichard Lawrencehttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/RichLawrence
<p>Artificial Intelligence is a phrase that often promotes a strong reaction in a lot of people who hear it. There are the gloom and doom prognosticators who tell us that 'Judgement Day', the day the intelligent machines take over and decide we are more trouble than we are worth and wipe us out is near. There are also the overly optimistic prognosticators which tell us that the day AI will take over and we will enter a golden age of humanity beyond our wildest dreams is near. Kasparov charts a…</p>
<p>Artificial Intelligence is a phrase that often promotes a strong reaction in a lot of people who hear it. There are the gloom and doom prognosticators who tell us that 'Judgement Day', the day the intelligent machines take over and decide we are more trouble than we are worth and wipe us out is near. There are also the overly optimistic prognosticators which tell us that the day AI will take over and we will enter a golden age of humanity beyond our wildest dreams is near. Kasparov charts a course in between these two extremes using the extremely compelling example of his two matches against IBM's Deep Blue. He won the first and lost the second which was the first time a World Chess Champion was defeated by a chess engine. Kasparov uses these matches, his preparation and the preparation the IBM team employed, to paint an interesting picture of both machine and human intelligence. The conclusion he draws is that machine and human intelligence are complimentary to each other and machine intelligence enhances human intelligence to the point where mediocre chess players using chess engines can easily defeat an International Grand Master and this has, in fact, been done. Our future, according to Kasparov, is to embrace what the machines offer us and use them to augment our human intelligence. Throughout the book Kasparov makes the point that research into AI has shown that machines are good at the types of things humans are not and vice versa. Machines can analyze millions of positions per second while humans can only go 4-5 moves in the future, for instance. On the flip side, the human mind can see what tactics are worthwhile and which are not which makes the human mind's search far more effective. The future, according to Kasparov and backed up by real-world results in the chess world, is a synthesis of the two the end result of which is the enhancing of the human mind. If you are interested in AI, chess and the future of expert systems this is one book you'll want to read.</p>The Thin Veneer of Deeply Held Religious Beliefstag:atheistnexus.org,2018-03-14:2182797:BlogPost:27938192018-03-14T23:00:00.000ZRichard Lawrencehttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/RichLawrence
<p></p>
<p><em>"I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.”</em> <br></br> <em>― Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the…</em></p>
<p></p>
<p><em>"I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.”</em> <br/> <em>― Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/pro-trump-pastor-says-thou-shall-not-have-sex-porn-star-totally-irrelevant-838017" target="_blank" rel="noopener">recent interview</a> on Fox News featured Robert Jeffress, an evangelical adviser to Trump and pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas defending President Trump concerning the recent Stormy Daniels scandal. To sum up the pastor's position: "We don't care what Trump has done in the past. What is important is what he can do for us now." The "we" that the pastor refers to is the community of the faithful, the ones with the "deeply held religious beliefs". These beliefs can be jettisoned in a moment with a theological slight of hand when it suits the interests of the faithful. These are the people who are suddenly seized with concern over the "sanctity of marriage" while having multiple spouses and divorces. These are the people who want to rewrite our laws to enforce these "deeply held religious beliefs', beliefs that they will jettison in an instant when it suits their purposes and gains them power over others in this world, the only world that actually concerns them, the only world they really believe in. The more fanatical of their ilk will tell you God actually talks to them and gives them instructions that the rest of us must follow. To even question this claim is now perceived as insulting to them and they will demand an apology from you for having the slightest doubt that the creator of the universe talks to them and them alone and has but them in charge. How dare you question them when they demand your time, your money and, most important of all, your unquestioned obedience and acceptance of what they say? How dare you question God?</p>
<p>But there is a silver lining to this. We see right through them now. We see them for what they are; parasites on society, a mental cancer that seeks to destroy this nation of laws and turn it into a theocracy with they, of course, occupying the position of 'theo'. Their 'deeply held religious beliefs' are the thinnest veneer over a festering infection of hate towards their fellow man that threatens all of us. Stand up to them and call them out when they stop indulging in their pet sins long enough to become suddenly obsessed with what others are doing. Question whatever authority they pretend to have and tell them you won't be spoken to in that manner by some other mammal, which is all they are. We've had enough and we've seen enough of this divine hypocrisy. Its time to push them back to the margins of society where they belong.</p>
<p> </p>The Death of a Friendtag:atheistnexus.org,2018-03-12:2182797:BlogPost:27936702018-03-12T19:00:36.000ZRichard Lawrencehttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/RichLawrence
<p><em>“A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you can't make old friends.”― Christopher Hitchens</em></p>
<p>Monday mornings and I have never managed to come to any sort of rapprochement. Mondays are not the sort of day one looks forward to for obvious reasons but some are far worse than others. For me, this last Monday was one of the more terrible ones. I was greeted with the news that an old friend had finally lost his ten year battle with cancer. The news from…</p>
<p><em>“A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you can't make old friends.”― Christopher Hitchens</em></p>
<p>Monday mornings and I have never managed to come to any sort of rapprochement. Mondays are not the sort of day one looks forward to for obvious reasons but some are far worse than others. For me, this last Monday was one of the more terrible ones. I was greeted with the news that an old friend had finally lost his ten year battle with cancer. The news from the week prior was not good but we all expected him to make a recovery as he had many times previously. Fate, it seems, had other intentions for our friend this time.</p>
<p>In this day of social media news spreads quickly. Well wishes and condolences started to stream in. I found myself on the phone with mutual friends who I hadn't spoken with in years. I've always thought it a shame that that the only time we call or reach out to each other these days is when someone we know passes away. It was good to hear their voices as it reminded each of us of a time when our friend was still there, laughing one more time about the adventures of our youth and the coming of age experiences we shared. As we talked and the conversations moved to what was now the all consuming event in our lives, the death of our friend, we seemed to part ways in spirit. They took great consolation believing that the spirit of my friend 'lived on' in heaven and would be watching over those of us who were still dwelling in the land of the living. It was if they were talking about color to a blind man.</p>
<p>I'm a naturalist so I don't have a belief in the supernatural which includes a place where the departed spirits go after this life is over. All we have, in my view, is our brief time together while we are alive in this world. I take consolation in the fact that my friend left a large body of work for us to enjoy and the memories I have of the times and experiences we shared. I find it especially rewarding that I can look up at a sky full of stars and remember the many times we spent gazing through my telescope and waxing philosophical about life, the universe and everything, to quote Douglas Adams. These memories also create a sense of urgency in me to take out the telescope when I might not feel like it, to pack up the bass and head out to that Blues Jam when I would rather stay home and to sit down and write that article when all I'd rather do is surf Facebook. We all have a limited time to do the things we want to do; some of us have more than others as life so often brutally reminds us. Eventually the silence of the grave will overtake us all and our voices will be extinguished. But while we are alive our voices ring out loud and clear. Now is the time to be heard, now is the time to make music and dance. May the life of my friend and all he accomplished constantly keep this fire alive in me; I can't think of a better way to honor his memory until that eternal silence overtakes me.</p>The new social media that won't track you: MeWe.comtag:atheistnexus.org,2018-03-10:2182797:BlogPost:27934452018-03-10T06:23:42.000ZCane Kostovskihttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/AtheistTech
<p>I have been using it for two days and it needs more people. It's much like FB, but without ads or tracking.</p>
<p></p>
<p><a href="https://mewe.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://mewe.com</a> secure too!</p>
<p>I have been using it for two days and it needs more people. It's much like FB, but without ads or tracking.</p>
<p></p>
<p><a href="https://mewe.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://mewe.com</a> secure too!</p>RIP Billy Graham, merchant of delusiontag:atheistnexus.org,2018-03-06:2182797:BlogPost:27932432018-03-06T23:00:00.000ZAlan Perlmanhttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/AlanPerlman
<p>My stomach has been roiling with nausea, my eyes perpetually rolling, at the outpouring of religiosity that accompanied the passing of the most successful fantasy merchant of the last century, perhaps of all time.</p>
<p>His message -- God loves you -- is absurd. George Carlin first described religion's visions of the tortures of hell -- then ended with "...but he LOVES you." So much for God's love. </p>
<p>I'm really sorry that major secular organizations didn't speak out -- or speak out…</p>
<p>My stomach has been roiling with nausea, my eyes perpetually rolling, at the outpouring of religiosity that accompanied the passing of the most successful fantasy merchant of the last century, perhaps of all time.</p>
<p>His message -- God loves you -- is absurd. George Carlin first described religion's visions of the tortures of hell -- then ended with "...but he LOVES you." So much for God's love. </p>
<p>I'm really sorry that major secular organizations didn't speak out -- or speak out more loudly -- against this tsunami of bullshit, including wall-to-wall TV coverage. Nobody dared question it. </p>
<p>Billy Graham was no friend of reason and critical thought, which have been responsible for all human progress. Instead, he promised to make you ever closer to his fantasy friends, thereby ensuring a permanent state of childhood in anyone who took him seriously. Left alone, children abandon fantasy friends. But as B.F. Skinner observed, "Society attacks early, when the child is helpless."</p>
<p>What did Billy have that a million other clerical fantasy merchants didn't have? As a speechwriter, I give him lots of points for presence and oratory. He started at a very young age and worked hard to hone his craft. The man SOLD his message. And because he also really believed it, they bought it. ;.</p>
<p>And Presidents listened to this man! Or they pretended to, because religiosity in America is ineradicable -- and intrusive. In letters to the editor, I read that kids get shot in schools because we have taken God out of the schools. Only in this space could I say how ludicrous that proposition is. </p>
<p>But back to Graham. He made fantasy friends pay off -- for him, big-time. The amounts of money he was able to amass by selling access to the fantasy friends is astounding. Yes, he urged people to behave themselves and act morally -- because the fantasy friends said they have to. So when he died, instead of getting about the work of behaving ethically, countless people wasted countless hours in mass prayer services, which are disgusting exercises in humiliation and obeisance to those fantasy friends. </p>
<p>Billy Graham deserves no more respect than P.T. Barnum, with whom he had much in common. Instead, the response to his death was over the top. OK, believers can waste their time mourning him. But when the entire political apparatus of the state genuflects to this charlatan (and the leading secular voices are silent, far as I can tell), one wonders if our society will ever be able to question, much less rid itself of, the poison called religion. </p>The Laurence Krauss Debacletag:atheistnexus.org,2018-02-25:2182797:BlogPost:27925932018-02-25T03:00:13.000ZRichard Lawrencehttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/RichLawrence
<p>A recent <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/peteraldhous/lawrence-krauss-sexual-harassment-allegations?utm_term=.qpKD1jp4w#.ayomoVN1a" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Buzzfeed</a> article by <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/peteraldhous" title="Peter Aldhous">Peter Aldhous</a> <span class="byline__title">(BuzzFeed News Reporter),</span> <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/azeenghorayshi" title="Azeen Ghorayshi">Azeen Ghorayshi</a> <span class="byline__title">(BuzzFeed News Reporter),…</span></p>
<p>A recent <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/peteraldhous/lawrence-krauss-sexual-harassment-allegations?utm_term=.qpKD1jp4w#.ayomoVN1a" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Buzzfeed</a> article by <a title="Peter Aldhous" href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/peteraldhous">Peter Aldhous</a> <span class="byline__title">(BuzzFeed News Reporter),</span> <a title="Azeen Ghorayshi" href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/azeenghorayshi">Azeen Ghorayshi</a> <span class="byline__title">(BuzzFeed News Reporter), and</span> <a title="Virginia Hughes" href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/virginiahughes">Virginia Hughes</a> <span class="byline__title">(BuzzFeed News Science Editor) chronicles allegations of sexual misconduct by Dr. Laurence Krauss spanning at least a decade. According to the article their "<em>reporting is based on official university documents, emails, and interviews with more than 50 people</em>." Given the current social zeitgeist, I anticipate that all of these will become a matter of public record and, if the allegations are true, Dr. Krauss should bear full responsibility and suffer the consequences for these reprehensible actions, consequences which need to be quite stout. According to <a href="http://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/arizona-news/asu-responds-to-lawrence-krauss-sexual-misconduct-allegations" target="_blank" rel="noopener">KSAZ</a>, Arizona State University, where Dr. Krauss is a professor, has issued a statement that they are unaware of any allegations against him and have initiated a review. They have encouraged anyone who may have concerns about faculty, staff or students in this regard to come forward.</span></p>
<p>I'd encourage everyone to read the BuzzFeed article as it is not without bias against secularism. That being said there are a number of things in it that concern me. First and foremost the article states that Dr. Krauss has been banned from the campuses of two institutions, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario in response to complaints made against him. If true, this points to a pattern of behavior. The second is Dr. Krauss's response to the current allegations against him.</p>
<p>From the article,</p>
<p><em>In lengthy emails to BuzzFeed News, Krauss denied all of the accusations against him, calling them “false and misleading defamatory allegations.” When asked why multiple women, over more than a decade, have separately accused him of misconduct, he said the answer was “obvious”: It’s because his provocative ideas have made him famous.</em></p>
<p><em>“It is common knowledge that celebrity attracts all forms of negative attention from many different angles,” Krauss said in a December email. “There is no pattern of discontent revealed here that suggests any other explanation.”</em></p>
<p>My gut response to this is that his reply smacks of deflection. After further reflection, I am convinced that is what he is doing. I am a big fan of his work. His ability to communicate complex and difficult ideas is one of the best I've seen. Ergo, his inept response to these allegations raises even more suspicions in my mind.</p>
<p>Dr. Krauss has already suffered some repercussions from these allegations according to a recent <a href="https://gizmodo.com/science-organizations-cancel-lawrence-krauss-events-aft-1823280632" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Gizmodo</a> article. If the allegations are confirmed then it is the moral responsibility of all organizations to cut ties with Dr. Krauss for two reasons. First, the behavior itself. This sort of behavior should not be tolerated and it is up to the secular community to make a strong statement that it will not be tolerated within it's ranks and follow those words up with equally strong actions. Second, the self-professed <em>sine qua non</em> of the secular movement is the pursuit of the truth. We are fond of posting memes and quotes in social media and arguing in debates that it is the quest for truth that motivates us no matter how uncomfortable that truth may turn out to be. If these allegations are proven to be the truth then Dr. Krauss's initial denial was a flat out lie. That permanently disqualifies him to be a standard bearer in an organization or movement that professes to hold truth as the ultimate good.</p>Florida Students need America's Support to Stop School Shootings.tag:atheistnexus.org,2018-02-25:2182797:BlogPost:27926612018-02-25T00:11:45.000ZDyslexic's DOGhttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/DislexicDoggy
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">These students are on the right track, as Australia, Canada, Britain and Japan all prove that the way to stop Gun Violence is through banning guns.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Australia, Britain and Canada all have the same mental health problems with students and men, but they don't have the school shootings that America has, like 3 in a month, and likely to get more with the shooters getting coverage on media, thus giving them more…</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">These students are on the right track, as Australia, Canada, Britain and Japan all prove that the way to stop Gun Violence is through banning guns.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Australia, Britain and Canada all have the same mental health problems with students and men, but they don't have the school shootings that America has, like 3 in a month, and likely to get more with the shooters getting coverage on media, thus giving them more encouragement as most shooters seek recognition and the mass and social media is giving them the recognition they desire.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">So there are bound to be more shootings, because of this factor alone.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">So just stopping loons from having guns is not going to stop those who are clever at deception or slip through the screening cracks.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Oregon's blocking domestic abusers from having guns is a great start, and likely this was a product of these Florida student's protesting.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">So it is about time, or decades too late for such a movement as these students are spurring on to arise.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Americans should have been proactive like these students after Sandy Hook, but the NRA has been too powerful and clever in its deception of the American public and purchasing politicians.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">So it has been too late for many, like 30,000 people who die from shootings every year.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">In Australia not only did mass shootings completely stop, but gun deaths across the board, like from gun related crimes and suicides dropped by over 50%. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">So banning guns would save more than 15,000 American lives every year.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">So these students need all the support America can muster.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">These students are proving themselves to be Rational Critical Thinkers.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">They are not accepting the BS form the likes of Dumb Gov't Members like Rubio and Trump. </span></p>
<p></p>Using Theology's Favourite Form of Logic (Deductive) to Destroy Theology. All Theological Arguments Fail From Having an Invalid Primary Premise, "God".tag:atheistnexus.org,2018-02-24:2182797:BlogPost:27927502018-02-24T23:30:00.000ZDyslexic's DOGhttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/DislexicDoggy
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Every theologian I've ever encountered and even those debating atheists in public like William Lane Craig, Ken Ham, Lee Strobel and Ravi Zacharias, all base their arguments on Deductive Reasoning and</strong></span> <span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>the existence of their God.</strong></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Though Logically, using their very own Deductive Logic, all their arguments that assert the existence of a God,…</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Every theologian I've ever encountered and even those debating atheists in public like William Lane Craig, Ken Ham, Lee Strobel and Ravi Zacharias, all base their arguments on Deductive Reasoning and</strong></span> <span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>the existence of their God.</strong></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Though Logically, using their very own Deductive Logic, all their arguments that assert the existence of a God, such as "Without God there can be no morality", fail because they have automatically added a Premise to their argument that has not been Validated. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>To the Theologian; the without God, man could not be moral looks like this.</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Premise 1: Man was born sinful and so lacks morality.</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Premise 2: Morality was given to man by God.</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Conclusion: Therefore without God, man could not not have morality.</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Logically This is a Valid Conclusion, so the Theologian can consider it as a Win in an argument.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Problem with this is that there is a Missing Premise that the Theologian is Asserting, namely the Existence of God. </strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">So the Theologian is ignoring the missing Premise and the Syllogism actually looks like the following:</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Premise 0: or Universal Theological Premise: God Exists!</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Premise 1: Man was born sinful and so lacks morality.</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Premise 2: Morality was given to man by God.</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Conclusion: Therefore without God, man could not not have morality.</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Logically, Premise 0 (Existence) Needs to be validated before the Conclusion can be Valid or True.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Since nobody has Validated the Existence of God, Premise 0 is Not Valid and the Conclusion is always Invalid or False!</strong></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong>Therefore all Arguments for God by Theologians suffer from an Invalid Primary Premise and thus are all False by default. </strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">See what your local Theologians think about this! </span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Let me know their responses. :-D~</span></p>
<p><a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/n7NcUmpoeeEpdJDZIkq4G-ZByNSNcoVJStg9hH4hjisI1SKfNvbgHcnEd-Qhpw5LIeCLuVXsBJYCHEcEzVUZqJq4zv6*n*gF/TheologyInvalidPremise.jpg" target="_self"><img src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/n7NcUmpoeeEpdJDZIkq4G-ZByNSNcoVJStg9hH4hjisI1SKfNvbgHcnEd-Qhpw5LIeCLuVXsBJYCHEcEzVUZqJq4zv6*n*gF/TheologyInvalidPremise.jpg" width="640" class="align-full"/></a></p>Dear Senator Portman: Regarding Gun Control...tag:atheistnexus.org,2018-02-18:2182797:BlogPost:27923602018-02-18T18:00:20.000ZLoren Millerhttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/LorenMiller
<p>Don't ask why it's taken so long for me to write. Stipulated that I've been involved in "clicktivist" petitions about gun control and perhaps written my representatives here and there in the wake of past mass shootings. Somehow, this last incident at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High just GOT to me. That and learning that Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman has an "A" rating with the National Rifle Association pretty well broke my camel's back.<br></br><br></br>In any case, the following just went out…</p>
<p>Don't ask why it's taken so long for me to write. Stipulated that I've been involved in "clicktivist" petitions about gun control and perhaps written my representatives here and there in the wake of past mass shootings. Somehow, this last incident at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High just GOT to me. That and learning that Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman has an "A" rating with the National Rifle Association pretty well broke my camel's back.<br/><br/>In any case, the following just went out both to Portman's DC address by snail mail and through his Senate website.<br/> <br/> ========================<br/> <br/> Senator Portman:<br/> <br/> Ordinarily when writing a letter such as this, I would duplicate it across all my representatives. In this case, however – in the case of the issue of gun control – I am writing solely to you, because frankly your record sticks out like a sore thumb. Your opposition to any form of gun control or regulation, particularly in the face of tragedies which started long before Sandy Hook and continue with Parkland, Florida, staggers belief.<br/> <br/> Worse, it is illogical considering both the Second Amendment and technological progress since that amendment was written. At the time the Constitution was penned, it took a skilled marksman half a minute or longer to fire, reload, and fire again. In the 21<sup>st</sup> century, that same action with a semiautomatic weapon takes mere milliseconds to accomplish. The threat of a single musket 250 years ago is miniscule by comparison with modern-day firepower such as an AR-15, yet our government acts as though those weapons are equivalent when they are clearly not. Our patterns of thought regarding firearms and the law MUST change, or this trend will likely continue unabated.<br/> <br/> As regards change in thought, I know you are capable of such. When your son, Will came out as gay, your attitude towards the LGBT community changed, because all at once you had skin in that game. With that as backdrop, would it take him or someone else close to you being a victim of yet another shooting before you can recognize that laws written two centuries ago are not adequate to the current <em>status quo</em>?<br/> <br/> Someone once said, “If nothing changes, nothing changes.” We have had a horrendous tattoo of mass shooting after mass shooting, and nothing other than feckless “thoughts and prayers” have been offered to salve the grief of those who have had to face those tragedies head-on. What we require right now is strong, courageous ACTION to stave off what seems to be becoming a new and unacceptable normal. Please don’t blow me off as another gun control nut, and <em>please</em> don’t respond with a condescending form letter, expressing your opposition, while more children and adults die from gun violence. I’m asking you to be part of the change this country needs, and DO something, before one or more of your constituents becomes a headline.<br/> <br/> Sincerely,<br/> <br/> Loren C. Miller, Jr.</p>The Berlin Wall - A Melancholy Anniversarytag:atheistnexus.org,2018-02-18:2182797:BlogPost:27922782018-02-18T01:33:40.000ZRichard Lawrencehttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/RichLawrence
<p>“Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.”<br></br>― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas</p>
<p></p>
<p>This month marked what should be a joyous anniversary of the Mauerfall - the fall of the Berlin Wall. For on the fifth of February the Wall had been down as long as it had been up; precisely…</p>
<p>“Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.”<br/>― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas</p>
<p></p>
<p>This month marked what should be a joyous anniversary of the Mauerfall - the fall of the Berlin Wall. For on the fifth of February the Wall had been down as long as it had been up; precisely 10,315 days had passed since the Berlin Wall came down. The Berlin Wall has always always been a part of me having lived under it's shadow for three years and having been extremely privileged to have played a very small part in the effort which eventually brought it down. What makes this anniversary bitter-sweet is that the ideas of Madison, Jefferson, Adams and Thomas Paine that sparked our own revolution and were the ideas that inspired the spirit of the people behind that wall to demand freedom and ultimately tear down both the physical and ideological barriers that enslaved them now despised by a large number of people in the very country which began because of the revolution those ideas inspired, the only revolution still standing.</p>
<p>I can still vividly recall that warm summer afternoon in 1979 when my flight from Frankfurt touched down at Tegel. I was in West Berlin. Walking through the terminal to get to the taxi stand I noticed that there was an electricity in the air that was as palpable as the electricity you feel when walking the streets of midtown Manhattan. In spite of being surrounded by everything foreign, the language, the items for sale in the shops I walked past, or the Polizei walking two by two, machine guns at the ready, the zeitgeist in that terminal caused me to feel like I was home in a very subtle but moving way. This feeling of being home was able to anchor me over the next three years which turned out to be the most transformative years of my life.</p>
<p></p>
<p>The Cold War was fought and won in buildings like this all over the world. Our duty station was only a stone's throw from the Wall. You could see the Wall and the oversized watchtower as you walked through the front gate every time you went to work. It was a daily reminder of what you were fighting against. The time spent off-duty with the wonderful people of West Berlin was a constant reminder of what you were fighting for. The people of West Berlin were amazing. They taught me how much I took for granted. They taught me resilience and poise under the most difficult of circumstances. They taught me what good wine and what good beer was. Most importantly they taught me that the values we shared could survive any ideology, any foe, even an attempt to starve it to death. They were living proof of that. It was an honor to stand watch and defend them.</p>
<p>When the Wall came down it sent a clear message to the world that the rights of men and women to determine their own destiny, to be free to hold whatever ideas seemed good and right to them still had the power to transform nations. The power could be seen in all its glory in the streets of the city we once again simply called Berlin.</p>
<p>As I write this Angela Merkel has told what remains of 'the West' that they can no longer count on America. Indictments of Russian interference in our 2016 Presidential election have been released. We have a President who is suspected of entering into collusion with the Russians to steal the election. He currently is refusing to sign into law the strict sanctions against Russia the House and Senate overwhelmingly passed. Our love for freedom has morphed into a fetish for guns at whose altar we will gladly sacrifice our children by the dozens. We have Nazis marching in our streets and running people down with cars. We have turned hate into a virtue. But, as I write this, it appears that a nascent democracy is trying to birth itself in Iran. They are shouting down the Mullahs, burning Korans and Hijabs in the street and are willing to risk it all for the values they hold and the rights they demand. I hear the echos of the voices I heard on the streets of West Berlin in the shouts of the young people marching in the streets of Iran. It is good to see the revolution of 1776 is still alive and well in the world. It is sad to see it dying here in the land that started it all.</p>Ides of March - Git Diggin! - Vernal Equinoxtag:atheistnexus.org,2018-02-17:2182797:BlogPost:27920762018-02-17T14:40:11.000ZGarry Denkehttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/GarryDenke
<p><a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/rKfMvV-*qtJFHzNoOQgVSHiVUoiCU8pUmGARxkG-rBuTK8IIosvewOxSJfbJ2h5SST7tYTenycVIRQnzlb2SkvZ0hnvhIYhu/NASAseasonalvariations.jpg" target="_self"><img class="align-full" src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/rKfMvV-*qtJFHzNoOQgVSHiVUoiCU8pUmGARxkG-rBuTK8IIosvewOxSJfbJ2h5SST7tYTenycVIRQnzlb2SkvZ0hnvhIYhu/NASAseasonalvariations.jpg" width="431"></img></a></p>
<p>Recharging the Galaxies &amp; Planets magnetic shields<br></br> Exhuming, Universal magnetic reversal, Recharging…<br></br></p>
<p><a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/rKfMvV-*qtJFHzNoOQgVSHiVUoiCU8pUmGARxkG-rBuTK8IIosvewOxSJfbJ2h5SST7tYTenycVIRQnzlb2SkvZ0hnvhIYhu/NASAseasonalvariations.jpg" target="_self"><img src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/rKfMvV-*qtJFHzNoOQgVSHiVUoiCU8pUmGARxkG-rBuTK8IIosvewOxSJfbJ2h5SST7tYTenycVIRQnzlb2SkvZ0hnvhIYhu/NASAseasonalvariations.jpg" width="431" class="align-full"/></a></p>
<p>Recharging the Galaxies &amp; Planets magnetic shields<br/> Exhuming, Universal magnetic reversal, Recharging<br/> <a href="https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/431px_width/public/NASA-seasonalvariations.jpg">https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/431px_width/public/NASA-seasonalvariations.jpg</a></p>
<p>When you see the Heel Stone at Stonehenge moved, the Mishkan thereunder Surfaced, and a continuing Dimming of Light universally, BE SURE TO SHUT DOWN ALL Electric, Magnetic, and Electromagnetic systems; Universal Magnetic Reversal recharge by EMP set to occur in LESS THAN 72 HOURS after said Surfaced Mishkan time (UTC) at said Stonehenge Heel Stone.<br/> <a href="http://www.rumormillnews.com/MEDIA_EMAIL_ADDRESSES.htm">http://www.rumormillnews.com/MEDIA_EMAIL_ADDRESSES.htm</a></p>
<p>All of the above Have been notified.</p>
<p>Ralphy Raoul Wally<br/> Sir Walter Wally<br/> G. Willy Wally<br/>
Wally Hope</p>
<p>Increase A303 Stonehenge Tunnel to 6.12km (3.8mi)<br/> Accept offer. Citizens save £2B ... Git Diggin! G-D</p>
<p><a href="https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind1801&amp;L=BRITARCH&amp;F=&amp;S=&amp;P=20894">https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind1801&amp;L=BRITARCH&amp;F=&amp;S=&amp;P=20894</a><br/> <a href="https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/202895/sponsors/new?token=FaHZBL5uY3X3MYqoKvYU">https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/202895/sponsors/new?token=FaHZBL5uY3X3MYqoKvYU</a><br/> <a href="https://highwaysengland.citizenspace.com/he/a303-stonehenge-2018/supporting_documents/BED18%200014%20A303%20STONEHENGE%20CONSULTATION%2018%20for%20digita%202433.pdf">https://highwaysengland.citizenspace.com/he/a303-stonehenge-2018/supporting_documents/BED18%200014%20A303%20STONEHENGE%20CONSULTATION%2018%20for%20digita%202433.pdf</a><br/>
<a href="http://www.salisburyjournal.co.uk/">http://www.salisburyjournal.co.uk/</a><br/>
<a href="http://www.wiltshiretimes.co.uk/">http://www.wiltshiretimes.co.uk/</a></p>Scientific proof of human nature well suited for RBEtag:atheistnexus.org,2018-02-14:2182797:BlogPost:27916862018-02-14T06:04:08.000ZCane Kostovskihttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/AtheistTech
<p><a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/marco_alvera_the_surprising_ingredient_that_makes_businesses_work_better?utm_campaign=tedspread&amp;utm_content=image__2018-02-13&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_source=tedcomshare" rel="noopener" target="_blank">https://www.ted.com/talks/marco_alvera_the_surprising_ingredient_that_makes_businesses_work_better?utm_campaign=tedspread&amp;utm_content=image__2018-02-13&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_source=tedcomshare</a></p>
<p></p>
<p>This video talks about…</p>
<p><a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/marco_alvera_the_surprising_ingredient_that_makes_businesses_work_better?utm_campaign=tedspread&amp;utm_content=image__2018-02-13&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_source=tedcomshare" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://www.ted.com/talks/marco_alvera_the_surprising_ingredient_that_makes_businesses_work_better?utm_campaign=tedspread&amp;utm_content=image__2018-02-13&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_source=tedcomshare</a></p>
<p></p>
<p>This video talks about how to fix business, but it also can be applied to RBE.</p>Meditations on "Jonah"tag:atheistnexus.org,2018-02-13:2182797:BlogPost:27914132018-02-13T15:00:14.000ZLoren Millerhttp://atheistnexus.org/profile/LorenMiller
<p><em>They say Jonah, he was swallowed by a whale, <br></br> But I say, there's no truth to that tale.<br></br> I know Jonah, he was swallowed by a song.</em><br></br> -- Paul Simon, "Jonah"<br></br> <br></br> I was going to save that quote for an entry in the Quotations group, but it and the music that accompanies it really captured me this morning ... or “swallowed” me, as Paul put it.<br></br> <br></br> I really admire that – being so consumed with a skill, talent, or desire that it utterly occupies your life, as…</p>
<p><em>They say Jonah, he was swallowed by a whale, <br/> But I say, there's no truth to that tale.<br/> I know Jonah, he was swallowed by a song.</em><br/> -- Paul Simon, "Jonah"<br/> <br/> I was going to save that quote for an entry in the Quotations group, but it and the music that accompanies it really captured me this morning ... or “swallowed” me, as Paul put it.<br/> <br/> I really admire that – being so consumed with a skill, talent, or desire that it utterly occupies your life, as perhaps songwriting has done with people like Paul Simon or Billy Joel or any of a thousand other people for whom music making is as much obsession as it is vocation. It’s likely a bumpy ride in places, too, trying to find the perfect words to match a melody or a musical line to compliment an inspired lyric. Worse, going through writer’s block, when it doesn’t come at all, and you have to force yourself to keep the creative gears turning, lest they freeze entirely. And there’s the rush when it all comes together, when the author or composer feels like the work is finished and ready … only to worry whether this new creation will be met with praise or derision by the admiring bog. A bumpy ride, indeed.<br/> <br/> The closest I ever got to anything quite so certain was probably troubleshooting. From the time I was a kid, I seemingly always had a talent for taking things apart and putting them back together again, and in that process, learn how they worked. It was a rough-edged skill that needed refinement and polishing for the real world, especially since an unspoken yet critical requirement of those who fix things is that they have to get it RIGHT – 100 percent of the time – because that’s what the customer expects of them. Otherwise, they don’t keep their job long. Took a while for me, but there did come a point where that confidence grew in me, where I felt as though, if I could learn a device or a machine or a system properly, my skills and experience would allow me to ferret out any malfunction it might have and return it to working condition. What do I get out of it? In a word, satisfaction. <strong><em>I</em></strong> beat that problem; <strong><em>I</em></strong> found that bug, that pernicious failure mode, that hidden glitch. Sometimes it was even … well … “frictionless,” as though I were able to look into the system and intuit the problem, almost without effort. Does that feel as good as penning a chart-busting song? No idea, but that sense of accomplishment still means a lot to me.<br/> <br/> Which brings me to wonder: how many of us would want to be overwhelmed by a singular purpose like that? To find such a focus for our lives that it takes away ambiguity and leaves only a single-minded direction to follow. Could it be that this is what the religious believers want: to be swallowed by their god and their belief, to the point where any question or vagary is eliminated in favor of something utterly undeniable? Free will vs. predestination aside, that’s a pretty tall wish, and I’m sure you know the one about: “Be careful what you wish for; you might get it.”<br/> <br/> Such are the ruminations of a Tuesday morning, submitted for your approval.</p>